Navigating between tabbed property sheets in a display window of a mobile device can be quite a cumbersome experience. One potential reason for this difficulty is that the concept of tabbed property sheets was originally designed for display on a traditional computer monitor and navigation between property sheets was accomplished using a mouse. The difficulty in applying this concept to mobile devices arises largely as a result of the reliance of mobile devices on input means such as a stylus or a directional pad.
For mobile devices having a stylus, navigation between tabbed property sheets in a display window can be accomplished by tapping the tab associated with the desired property sheet with the stylus. The user must use both hands to accomplish this task as opposed to working directly with the user interface of the mobile device, which can be done with one hand.
For mobile devices having a directional pad, navigation between tabbed property sheets can be accomplished by moving through all of the elements in the current property sheet with the directional pad until the tabs (typically at the bottom of the display) are reached and then pressing the left or right keys of the directional pad to move to the tab corresponding to the desired sheet. The directional pad is intended for use in navigating between elements of a property sheet. At any given time, one of the elements within the property sheet may be the “active” element, e.g. the current control position or the cursor position, and the directional pad is used to change the active element to the next or previous element in the layout of the property sheet. Using the directional pad, one of the tabs may become the active element by cycling through all the other elements in the layout until that tab is reached. Once that tab has been “activated” as the active element, then the directional pad can be used to navigate between property sheets.
Some mobile device displays are also equipped with small left and right arrow buttons on the screen for revealing tabs that are not visible in the current display. Navigation to tabbed sheets that are not visible in the current display involves the further step of ‘clicking’ these arrow buttons with the stylus in order to reveal the hidden tabs. This action will not change the active element and the user must perform the further step of selecting the tab corresponding to the desired property sheet as described previously.
Like reference numerals are used throughout the Figures to denote similar elements and features.